The small island of Silves, 300km downstream of Manaus on the Amazon, is noted by the few westerners who go there for its intense peacefulness, its huge spiders and birds, and its community-run eco-lodge. It's owned by the jolly local environment group, which takes people out at night to point torches at the red eyes of crocodiles, and whose members head deep into the forests and people's homes. Silves is a truly marvellous place and is rightly listed in the Good Alternative Travel Guide.

The past few years have seen an explosion of small-scale, Silves-type community holidays offered in ever more remote places. At random, how about a week in the cloudforests of Ecuador with communities fighting giant copper mines? Or camel trekking with a Rajasthan cooperative, staying with local families in a Masai group, hilltribe trekking in Laos with villagers, or a mountain safari camp with indigenous groups in Namibia? Exotic, or what?

These holidays are not for the faint-hearted. They are encounters with real people, not the smooth, bland, often fake travel industry. They demand engagement in return for insights to how other people live. They can be rough and ready. Mrs B, tonight's cook, may be quite awful, the transport shambolic, and the wildlife hairier than anything you've imagined; you will probably be an object of intense curiosity - but it's life with real people who mostly offer superb hospitality.

As the Good Alternative Travel Guide points out, however, community tourism does not mean mud huts, political correctness and no baths. It now extends to £200-a-night safari lodges in Kenya and spiffy luxury in Latin America, with everything between. This is the only remotely comprehensive guide to what may be the closest any of us may come to exploration.

Meanwhile Rough Guides and the Department for International Development have linked to produce the totally politically correct Rough Guide to a Better World. It tries to counter the popular image of a disaster-wracked third world and contains a great rant from Bob Geldof and a thoughtful piece on volunteering by Jon Snow.

The book aims to show the positive face of development, but in telling us how to campaign for progress, it only confirms that the British government has been - and still is - hopelessly irresponsible. A bit of an own goal, chaps.